Derby training, Bay Area style

Yes, I'm such an international woman of mystery, jetsetting about and whatnot. I'm in San Francisco at the moment for two months. Of course, everyone knows that the US is the home of derby and that derby is like 52372865203875 times way more hardcore here than anywhere else in the world. So yep, I'm training with the Bay Area Derby (yes, BAD) Girls. Or trying to, but I'll explain later. Anyway, I was in contact with the league and had to do the whole "hey, can I skate with you?" thing, but they were really nice and helpful and said that I could. Yay.

Due to a policy that BAD has with visiting skaters and the fact that the Star System we use in Australia isn't identical to the WFTDA-approved skills test (or rather, that we don't have--yet--WFTDA leagues in Australia), I wasn't able to train with the actual BAD league. Instead, I'm training with the Reckless Rollers, which is their recreational league, made up of skaters who want to skate with BAD, or have retired from BAD, or people who are visiting, like me.

I had to contend with a street full of warehouses like this.

Anyway, so Saturday was the first training session I attended. They take new intakes every month, and then (as I learned) the skills get progressively harder during the month, and then at the beginning of the month they get easier again. But I'll talk about skills later. Anyway, the first thing you should know is that BAD trains in a giant shed in West Oakland. For someone who doesn't know anything about West Oakland, one of the things that you learn first is that it's a scary place.

I got there and someone let me in. It was weird being the new kid again, but I managed to find Mindi (who was the coach) and she set me up with some paperwork. I had to hand over money to cover training fees for the month and also for WFTDA insurance (which runs for a year, so I'll be covered this year if I want to skate with a WFTDA league anywhere, hooray). While I was filling out paperwork and whatnot, people had started doing the warmup. Basically, the warmup was as follows:

5x running laps of track

Sideways crossover hop things, kind of like this, for 5 min:

Agility ladder: in/out both feet, 5 min

Skips with high knees, 5 min

Stretches

The agility ladder was kind of neat. Basically, BAD's training grounds have a couple of agility ladders bolted into the ground so you can do drills before you skate. The one we did was like this:  you go in the square (made by the side and the rungs) with one foot then the other, then out on one side of the ladder, then back in, then back out. I thought too much about it and stepped on my own foot and Mindi had to pull me aside and explain to me what we were doing. D'oh. Embarassing.

But yeah, doing 5 mins of sideways crossover hopping thingies and skipping around a track is surprisingly tiring. But then after that it was time for skates on! How exciting. Although this is a rec league, a lot of people had fancypants skates. Nobody was on stock wheels that I could see. Mouthguards seemed to be optional, and people would walk around with their skates on without their helmets. Haha. But it wasn't too bad. Basically once you're on track, you're on track the whole time. We put our water bottles in the middle of the track for when Mindi called breaks.

The floor looked like it was made up of this stuff.

One of the first things I did notice though was that BAD skates on this plastic tile track. It looks like lots of plastic jigsaw puzzle squares assembled together on some interlocking thing, but they're not all completely flat so when you skate on them it's like constant bumps. And it's way less grippier than the wood floors I've been used to. Oh geez. Oh and then the first thing we did was a warm-up skate going anti-derby. Hahaha I saw everyone skating and was like OMGWTF DERBY IS BACKWARDS HERE but it was fine. We did that for a bit, and then split into groups and practiced stops.

We practiced ALL OF THE STOPS: Ts (OH GOD I HATE THEM), plows, hockey stops and tomahawks (which interestingly are called "tip and toe" or something here?). Basically you had to skate down the straight bit and stop on the turn. I basically sucked at everything. I did make a nice braking noise with my wheels on plows though. Also I noticed that tomahawks are done slightly differently here: we kind of go backwards and straight onto our toes, here they go backwards, then slide your toe stop onto the ground and so you're braking longer. Weird. Then we did the same thing but with slaloms on the straight and then turns. And then after THAT it was like 5 minutes of skating nonstop as fast as you can, slaloming through the cones on the straight and crossing on the corners. I didn't fall over (phew) but it got harder towards the end. I blame jelly legs + lack of coordination + not being used to the floor. But yay, not falling over.

And the finally, we did the shopping cart drill!! Haha, but not how we do shopping carts at VDL with one person you're pushing. Oh no. Here, you push a minimum of FIVE people. You do a lap of sticky skating pushing five people (and they don't help at all, and you have to sticky skate the corners too) and then you skate to the front and the next person pushes. We did this for five minutes or so, but at one point Mindi got on the front of the shopping cart and frigging plow stopped the entire lap so we went at less than1kph. Lucky I was not pushing at that time. But seriously, this shit it tough.

And then we were done! The training sessions were only about 1.5 hours (including offskates) but they were MEGA intense. Oh wait. I thought we were done. Then there was the warm down. There was lots of stretching, including doing that opposite arm and leg stretch thingy that kind of looks like this:

Remember, I have jelly legs and I'm doing this with all my gear on, including skates. We do a couple on each side, holding for about 10 seconds and then switching. And then after that it was pushups! Whoo. Normally I'm okay with pushups and I don't mind doing them. But we did like 10 normal pushups, and then we did pushups where you hold the "down" bit for 5 seconds, and then 10 seconds, before you pushed yourself back up (you could take your helmet and wrist guards off for this). And then it was pyramid pushups! One pushup, then two in a row, then three in a row, all the way up to five in a row, and then one pushup holding the "down" bit for 10 seconds, then 5 in a row again, then 4, and so on back to one. So basically I did like something close to 50 pushups, and this happens on a regular basis. Blah. I'm happy to report that I was one of about three people who managed to do all of these non-girly, although I was a bit wobbly on my toe stops towards the end. But yes. Hello beefy arms. Oh and then my shoulder and my boob muscles hurt the next day, but anyway.

Not done yet! Planks for 60 seconds! ARGH! Okay. And THEN we were done after planks. FINALLY. Then I crawled to my water bottle and lay on the track in a sweaty heap with some other people. I guess the good thing is that everyone is really nice there and supportive and about the same level of fitness so I was about middle of the pack. I talked to a few of the girls and they have a beer vending machine in the BAD HQ, and everyone kind of hangs out afterwards, so that was cool. Next time I'll take photos of the place so you can see it, but it was a really neat experience. (Of course, trainings are Sat/Sun so you have like either 1 day or 6 days to recover, bleh. But yay.)